Sometimes we want our functions to provide information back to the program that called them.

A function can give a value back to the caller using the return keyword. The code that calls the function can assign the value returned to a variable.

For example, we could change our Python program to calculate the average of two numbers, instead of printing it:

def calculate_average(num1, num2):
    return (num1 + num2) / 2

Now our function will return the average back to the code that called it. Let’s write some code that calls the function, assigns the returned value to a variable, and prints that variable:

avg = calculate_average(12,48)
print('average is', avg)

When we called calculate_average with the inputs of 12 and 48, the function returns a value of 30.0. We then store that returned value into the variable avg. When we print avg it’s equal to 30.0, resulting in the following output:

average is 30.0